


The One in Control

by bluecrownedmotmot



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Creepy, Gen, Robo-eye Trauma, Suspense, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-27 23:41:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8422186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluecrownedmotmot/pseuds/bluecrownedmotmot
Summary: Post pacifist ending. Someone doesn't want to join Mettaton's fan club.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Just a heads up, there's a slur in the dialogue.

Mettaton allowed his eyes to be dazzled by the lights. He did so relish gazing up into the mechanical heavens of a theatre. Night after night, he loved becoming the god of this realm.

When he brought his chin back down, for a few bright moments he couldn't see a thing.

But, oh, it was impossible not to hear them all out there. They positively roared. He started the song, his vision returning as he began singing and prancing around on cue. His sight was fully restored by the time he reached the segment with no concrete blocking.

It was really a wonderful show tonight, with a wonderful audience.

Usually he improvised, or went over to Blooky, but tonight, he used the time to go downstage, to the very edge. He crouched down. The people in the front rushed in. He dipped his hand into the crowd and let his fans grab his fingers. Different people reached out, touched him. When he pulled back, they let him go, turning to each other to scream with excitement.

He stood, and he returned to center stage. He was smiling even more than he usually did as the song ended. What an ego trip.

 

He had been feeling better lately.

 

They were not terribly far away from Mount Ebott that night. The tour, this time around, was restricted to a relatively local area. Nonetheless, it was a day's journey by road back home, so they had opted to stay over at a hotel.

Mettaton was in his room, the fanciest the place had to offer. He was lounging in an empty, heart-shaped hot tub. If only he could fill it! But that, really, was not a great idea. He was relatively water resistant, true. But he never totally submerged, even when he was washing off. So instead, he was pulling the petals off of flowers fans had thrown on stage and was casting them about. Had to entertain yourself somehow after the rest of your entourage was asleep in their own rooms, darling.

 

That was where he was, and what he was doing, when his phone rang.

 

He didn't usually answer if he didn't recognize the caller. But, when he danced his hand across the sparkling tiles, slid the patiently ringing device closer with a forefinger, and glanced down at the screen, he noted that the area code was local to the Mount Ebott area. And it was a strange hour. So he picked up.

“Yes?” he said. Anyone who had his number either knew who he was already or had misdialed. No need to identify himself.

Wherever the caller was, there was wind. Mettaton listened to it blow over the microphone.

“You're the only one whose number I could get.”

 _One? Of the band? Something to do with the theatre back home, maybe?_ “Who is this?” He combed his fingers through his hair.

“A ghost,” said the caller. Peals of laughter. “But not one like you.”

Mettaton hung up.

He stared at the screen of the phone, convincing himself over and over that he had indeed hung up. For good measure, he shut the thing down. He stared at the screen now that it was black.

_Who would know that?_

Certainly not anyone with that voice. Sort of an alto pitch. Or maybe countertenor. Young. No-one he knew. But they knew him, didn't they?

Mettaton got out of the tub. He checked the peephole. When he opened his door, he looked one way and then the other down the empty hallway. There was a flickering light down one end, but otherwise all was as it should have been at this hour. Deserted.

Of course. What did he expect?

His cousin's room was right across from his own. He felt slightly bad waking Napstablook up, but not bad enough not to do it. He knocked.

 

***

 

It happened again after the next performance. A different city, one closer to Mount Ebott, so they all returned to their homes. The call came shortly after the tour bus dropped Mettaton off. He hadn't even had a chance to turn the lights on when he took the call, so he stood awkwardly in the dark threshold of his living room, coat dangling off one shoulder.

“Are you gonna hang up on me again?” said the voice.

“I may,” said Mettaton. “Who are you?”

The person seemed to be considering, as once again, wind blew. “A fan. How was your show?”

“It was great,” Mettaton replied, mind racing “Were you there?”

The voice laughed. “No. But... Are you sure it went well tonight?”

And then the line went dead.

 

He slept a lot that evening and into the next day. That night, he had nowhere to be. He reread the entirety of a favorite book in a comfortable chair.

It was fairly late when the comment from the previous day had finally bounced around in his head one too many times.

_Are you sure it went well?_

He went online and searched for reviews to his latest performance. And of course, he found something negative. The person writing hadn't liked the set list, and had called Mettaton “a cyborg with flamboyant style but not a hint of substance.” And he was “hiding behind a poncy, peacockish, and ultimately pointless persona.” _Apparently at this paper we get promoted based on our ability to alliterate_. On the other hand, they liked Napstablook, Shyren, and the overall design of the show. What really bothered him was toward the end... “I look forward to the day that the two supporting band members move on to their own projects and MTT no longer haunts the stage.”

Haunts. _Haunts._ That was just a turn of phrase wasn't it?

He closed his laptop.

 

Sometimes he walked around the city when it was very late. It was better than pacing nervously around his apartment.

He definitely needed fresh air tonight.

He strolled through the theatre district. Shows were long since over at this hour, but certain establishments were still open. He watched the sparse late night crowd trickle out of bars and clubs, get into cabs. Listened to bursts of laughter, squeals of passing sirens bounce off the buildings. Occasionally, he happened upon figures curled up tight in rugs or battered coats tucked into dark doorways.

A car pulled up alongside him as he strolled. He glanced at it. Silver BMW. Not an out of place car for this area. But no-one he knew, certainly. And when the window rolled down, indeed it was a human man he'd never seen before.

“Hey, baby. Want to get in?”

“Do you know who I am?” replied Mettaton, with a curl of his lip.

“A monster tranny?”

There was a loud bang of metal on metal as Mettaton crashed against the side of the car. He almost caught the guy's throat, perhaps it was for the best he didn't after all, but the car took off and screeched around the corner.

Pain. The arm that had been in car had been pulled out of its socket. Mettaton held it to his side and ran down a couple of cross streets away from the direction the car had driven. He pulled off his jacket in an alley and assessed that no wires or cables had been disconnected before wrenching the arm back into place.

 _So much for going out to wind down_ , he thought ruefully. He shrugged the jacket back on and turned in the direction of home.

When he was far away, he paused at a closed shop to look at himself in the dark glass. He looked almost human in the murky light. Almost.

_Not so divine now, huh?_

He felt like he was going crazy again.

 

***

 

The very next night, something happened after their performance. Generally, it was possible to escape venues at the end of a show without being swamped by fans. The band would know which door was the safest and could slip away without notice while fans gathered somewhere more prominent. But there were crowds at every exit this time. Mettaton, Napstablook, Shyren, and Burgerpants decided to just pick the one closest to their bus. Burgerpants took the lead, and Napstablook followed him closely. Shyren and Mettaton stuck together, patiently allowing fans to take pictures of them, accepting gifts, and signing things for monsters and humans within reach. Venue security followed, scanning the area and reminding the crowd to allow their idols space. They maintained their line, edging closer and closer to the bus.

 

It occurred just as Shyren and Mettaton were within steps of the bus. While Mettaton was bent down, signing a poster for a small monster, someone else thrust something into his face. He reacted fast, but not fast enough. He felt a crunch, heard a crystalline scrape. He dropped the pen he was holding, dropped the flowers he had had in the crook of his arm, and brought his hand to the right side of his face.

The crowd shifted in panic. The guards pushed through, seeking the culprit. Shyren shoved Mettaton sideways and he staggered onto the bus with her. The driver shut the door right away and Mettaton sat on the top step. Napstablook and Burgerpants rushed over.

“Are you alright?” squeaked Shyren. “I turned around, and I saw your head come up quick.”

“I saw a flash,” said Mettaton, voice shaking. He had just attempted to blink and discovered what the issue was immediately. He felt grains of glass in his palm. He took his hand away from his face and they dropped to the floor. “Blooky or Burgerpants, please call Alphys, would you?”

“I'll do it.” Burgerpants hurried to retrieve his phone.

“A flash?” said Napstablook.

“Like metal. Like a knife. Or an ice pick. But I didn't see _who_.”

“Oh god, I didn't see either,” whispered Shyren. “There were a whole bunch of people near you.”

His eye, or what was left of it, didn't hurt in and of itself, but a broken edge was digging into his eyelid. “Burgerpants, sweetheart, tell her it's an emergency,” he called. “We were planning on going back anyway tonight, correct?”

“Um, yes,” said Napstablook. “We're only a couple of hours away from home. What did-”

“Shattered my eye,” he replied tersely. He got to his feet. “But it's nothing. Alphys can fix it.”

 

He spoke to Alphys on the phone. He spoke to the security guards, describing again and again what had happened. It seemed no-one had actually seen the person responsible. A lot of the crowd had dispersed and the remainders had no useful information. Did Mettaton wanted to file a police report? No, no; that would not be necessary. He didn't want a big deal made of this. He just wanted to return home. The bus departed.

 

He huddled in a seat and told everyone to leave him alone for a while. He dislodged the rough edge causing him pain with tweezers. He still couldn't close his eye, but at least it didn't stab into him anymore. _Don't look_ , he told himself. He pulled a compact out of his bag and turned it over in his hand several times. He sighed, opened it, pulled up his hair, and stared into the small mirror. The damage was limited to his eye, but the eye was wrecked without a doubt. The glass was gouged in a jagged concave shape, and mechanical bits were visible, jammed and twisted. Unnerving, but at least his body was just a shell. The damage would have been far more gruesome if he inhabited a natural form. _And hey, at least it's the right one,_ he told himself. _Can't usually see it, or see out of it much anyway._

Things like this happen.

It's the risk you take.

No big deal.

His cell phone rang. He picked it up without thinking.

“We'll be there in an hour and a half,” he said, believing he was speaking to Alphys.

The response was chilling laughter and the garbled skipping of a bad connection.

Mettaton hung up, slowly.

“Was that Alphys?” asked Napstablook, peeking tentatively up from the seat in front of their cousin.

“Yes,” replied Mettaton, clenching his hands into fists to stop them from trembling.

 

***

 

“Mettaton, _please_ cancel your next few shows,” Alphys begged. Her voice was rough. She'd been crying.

“Can't do that,” said Mettaton. He was on his back on her workbench, his hair clipped up off his face. “Get to work, please. It's like 1 AM. Start so you can go back to sleep.”

“H-how can you just-”

“Alphys. It would disappoint many people if I did that. Just because one person wanted to hurt me...”

“Y-yeah, I suppose.” She sniffled. “It's p-probably an isolated incident. Are you sure that you'll be safe in the future?”

“Of course, my dear.” His voice was expressionless. He stared up at the ceiling with his good eye. “It's not like this is just one part of a larger set of occurrences I don't entirely understand or anything.”

Alphys, lacking familiarity with the way his past few days had gone down, took this at face value.

He let his best friend fret over him. He had to go away mentally as she worked because he couldn't stand listening to her worry out loud on his behalf, and honestly, he was freaking out himself. It disconcerted him that he was so good at vanishing at this point. But he felt hardly a thing when he did it.

Alphys had spare Mettaton-eyes, so replacement was no issue. It took her longer to take the side of his face off, the side that usually lay under his forelock, and to clean up the damage than it took to install the new eye. He asked to see before she put the removed section back in place. She held up a mirror. When he hadn't been complete, that uneven side of his visage had been exposed, hidden only by his hair. A daily reminder that his cherished appearance was only skin deep. When he was content, Alphys carefully snapped the piece back into position.

Now he could forget again. _Good_.

She traced the seam with her finger to make sure it lay snug, before letting his hair back down over it. Her claws skating across his metal surfaces tingled, coaxing him back down from wherever he had been.

He wanted to sob, but he mastered his feelings, smiled, and thanked her.

 

***

 

The next day, he tried calling the number. It just rang and rang until a recording told him that no voicemail had been set up. He was disconnected every time.

He tried a reverse phone number lookup. All that he could discover was that it was a cell phone.

He tried watching a movie as the sun went down. He stopped when he realized the plot involved someone changing things subtly to make someone else believe they were insane. Yeah, hell no. That was a little too real right now, thank you. He pulled a leather jacket out of the closet and headed out the door.

 

He walked on and on, trying to get as far away from everything he knew as he could.

He eventually succeeded.

He couldn't orient himself by the skyline because nothing within view was familiar. Even the mountain was obscured. But he had a good sense of direction; he knew if he just turned around, that was the general way home and he'd hit something recognizable at some point. So he kept going farther away, wanting to explore just a bit more.

Warehouses, power lines cutting darkly across the light-polluted sky, cold storage, an enormous ventilation tower for a subterranean highway...

His phone rang. He looked at the number. He answered. “Did you attack me, darling?”

“Wouldn't you like to know,” said the voice playfully. This evening, the line buzzed harshly with interference.

“Say that to my face, sweetheart. I promise you, I will-”

“'Eager as always, eh? But don't touch that dial. There's something you haven't accounted for.'”

Something locked into place in Mettaton's mind. Those words... He _knew_ them.

And he knew _he_ was the one who had said them.

He realized...

... _Something ghastly?_ his own voice echoed in his head. That too, was familiar.

This wasn't false recognition. This was something else. His subconscious was positively screaming at him. _WRONG WRONG WRONG-_

He let the phone fall from his fingers. The screen broke on the concrete. He crunched the center with his heel, stomped until the device was dead and dismembered on the sidewalk. As he was doing so, the wind picked up, moaned through the spaces between hulking industrial buildings in a very recognizable way...

 

He turned and ran. He was fast, long-legged and agile on his heels. And yet, he still felt something sinister bearing down on him. Some dark knowledge better off ignored, denied...

 

He'd get a new phone. A new number. He'd forget this had ever happened.

 

***

 

It seemed incredible, but for periods of time, he did forget. He'd always been good at forcibly putting the past behind him. And that entire strange incident, after a couple of weeks had passed, was now the past. However his first number had been leaked, the breach was not repeated. The caller never discovered his new number. The tour went on. Audiences loved them. It was difficult to keep the sense of primal dread vivid in his mind when everyone was shouting their names, singing their songs.

 

At the very end of some shows, he'd get nervous.

The moments when he'd take that last look out into the shadowy crowd.

When he'd sneak out backstage doors to go home for the evening.

Even sometimes from his apartment balcony in Mount Ebott, when he'd look down at the city at night.

 

Anyone could be out there.

**Author's Note:**

> happy halloween
> 
> http://motmotfluttersforth.tumblr.com/


End file.
